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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23750065">north of calipatria</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXstaystillXx/pseuds/xXstaystillXx'>xXstaystillXx</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Death, Implied Necrophilia, M/M, Sibling Incest</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 16:08:10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,603</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23750065</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXstaystillXx/pseuds/xXstaystillXx</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The one time you weren’t standing in his way turned out to be the one time it counted for keeps.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gerard Way/Mikey Way, Kobra Kid/Party Poison (Danger Days)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>north of calipatria</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i just wanna start this off by saying that he does not fuck his brothers dead body. theres some maudlin corpse stripping and thats as bad as it gets</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This place always fucking howls at you; wind scraping across the dunes, a million grains of sand shirting together and grinding so quiet and so careful that when it all piles together it’s one big sound, near to human, a fucking groan, the world bitching at you. You hate it. You’ve always hated it, and you think he did, too— fucking burns like anything to have to go back and correct yourself, <i>did</i>, not <i>does</i>, he isn’t ever going to hate anything again— but he never let you know. Not in words, not like you would, every member of your adult boys’ gang had their bouts of bellyaching (roaches in your hair, rat bites all the way through a pack of cigs; too hot, raining obnoxiously hard; too cold, been so fucking dry for so long) but it’s like his fair share of the pile landslided in the middle and all the extra complaints he never said would pour outta you, instead. </p><p>Verbose. He’d call you verbose; that stuccedy bite to his voice, letters curved the same shape as his mouth, “Y’fucking verbose, Party, y’know that? Motormouth,” and you’d say “Motor<i>baby</i>, isn’t it,” like you were inventing the word. The world bitched and you bitched back, and he kept on dogging your heels and laying down coverfire and never quite opening his fucking mouth to tell you exactly how badly he wanted to wring your skinny neck for all the shit you put him through. </p><p>You haven’t opened your mouth to do anything except spit on the ground all day. Maybe he’d want a eulogy but you don’t know how you’re supposed to give it to him; you can’t fucking make yourself speak, and even if you could, what the fuck would you say? How do you sum up a whole life? 30-something years— and used to that was a joke, thirtysomething as a self-flattery, lying by omission, but now you don’t even know how old you are to feel bad about getting old; you tried to keep track at first but the notebook you’d been tallying days in got swallowed up in the endless ratrun, the floorboards of the Trans Am. You’re being stupid, he isn’t going to get a gravestone, not after the vultures, but you’d like to have a fucking date to put on one anyway. No gravestone, no eulogy, because you can't put that many years of life in speech— not a speech, not a presentation, but <i>speech</i>, as in you couldn’t pin him down to words if you tried. Not him. Not everything. </p><p>Not him. You’ve said that already today— maybe today, maybe yesterday, the stars are still out but it could be seven pee-ehm, it could be four ahh-ehm for all you fucking know. Not him. Screamed it; <i>Not him, not fucking him, please, God, Mikey, Mikey, not him,</i> screamed your guts out strung along to sentences like that, useless ones, useless ones you wish you would’ve composed fucking better, maybe fit his eulogy in there, because it was so selfish to say <i>Not him</i> when you meant <i>Me next, fucking please, kill me, not without him I can’t without him</i> and you were stupid enough to save that for when the fuckers who killed him were out of earshot and couldn’t take you up on your offer as the others bundled you up into the backseat of the car and you lost the nails on three of your fingers from holding onto his jacket and his body came dragging into your lap heavy and concrete like a direct one-on-one parody of all the times he’d pinned you down to the backseat of that goddamn Trans Am. </p><p>—</p><p>It was his idea; not the vigil— that part came later— but the grand scheme of it, the Tibetan Sky Burial for kids? That was all him.</p><p>He'd gotten that oddball look to him post-fuck; canted himself up on one elbow, laid next to you under the shadow of the car, and said “When you die I’m going to eat your body,” not <i>if</i> you die and not a joke, either. You were still muggy from coming hard enough to see stars but you knew enough about him and his moods to grin, go “Sweet, leave my bones for the vultures, I wanna know what it’s like to be bird shit,” and he nodded all serious, you pulled him down by his bandana, and you got lost in each other for another twenty-minute hunk. </p><p>Then two months later Showpony stepped on a rattler and the first time since the world went to the dogs, you had the body of a friend on your hands.</p><p>“You gonna eat it?” </p><p>“No.” </p><p>“We're gonna leave him here?” </p><p>“No,” he had cocked his head to the blackbody birds wheeling a mile above the plains— attracted by Pony’s <i>Oh, shit, we left him out in the sun all day</i> stink, or maybe by whatever inexplicable pulse of Death that shoots through the world like ripples through a pond and draws in the vultures— and said “They’ll take care of it. We can keep an eye on him, at least.” </p><p>And ta-da, three days of watching Pony get picked clean by the birds, keeping guard in shifts and wincing and groaning like a horror-movie audience whenever something ruptured. That’s how easy it was; just a word or two made action, made tradition, part of The Grand Killjoy Verbal Bible: He’s How To Survive (Or At Least Pretend You’re Trying To Stay Alive For A Reason). Everything had so much meaning back then, so fullblooded alive in the fucking Nevada-esque scrubbrush, endless Vegas without the strip and you don’t even fucking think you’re in Nevada— it used to be California, once upon a time, but there’s been so much running you've got no idea where in the U. S. of A. you are. All of you like rats dashing for cover when BLI/ND flicks on the lights, insects in their big fucken’ model train set, your little car and your little ray-guns all plastic remakes of the real thing but just as deadly if you cared to turn the barrel to yourself, speeding along a stretch of desert at 9000 miles an hour and kicking up the most realistic cloud of dust you’ve ever seen, Jee-sus, what’s the production value on this? What’d you use? Cotton? Concealer-powder suspended in the air? </p><p>—</p><p>You end up touching him (him? it? Kobra? Mikey? the body?) almost by accident. The childish kind of accident, the unthinking kind rather than the on-purpose <i>Whoops, I slipped</i> kind and like, legally, that may make a difference, premeditation and all that, but all the courts burnt up an age ago and may as well have taken the rest of humanity with them because now nothing is stopping you from this; nobody to watch you reach out with insultingly steady fingers and brush a strand of hair away from his eyelid. </p><p>You’re expecting sensation to catalog (strawlike for his bleached-out hair, tacky damp-paper drag for his eyelid) but your fingertips went numb hours ago. It doesn’t leave you emptier, or colder, or make you want to take a second pass to make sure— as if grief is a fucking arcade game that swallowed your quarters and needs an extra feed of change to get going— it just doesn’t feel like anything; but it doesn’t feel like nothing, either. </p><p>You don’t have the words for it. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like him. </p><p>Vigils don't come with a rulebook, unless you count oral history, and the only oral history you got was <i>Watch him till dawn</i> then a bunch of fucken' blowjob jokes (ha-ha, oral) so you're not sure if you just damned your brother to hell by touching him, or turned him into a zombie, or whateverthefuck is supposed to happen when you break the rules. If there are any; that's the trouble with trying to make up a new religion out of half-remembered dateline stories and scrap metal and fluorescent spray paint and the kiddy fucking makebelieve that you all needed to keep yourselves orbiting around some Tonka-truck knockoff of sanity. </p><p>You shift on your heels until your boots stop pinching your ankles in half. Something cracks under the sand; aimless, you dig down until you reach it, and come up with half a broken glass bottle pinched between your numb nail-less fingers. It's green. </p><p>You hold it up to the light and the glare just about blinds you; you hold it up over Mikey's face and he gets a green glossy sheen, like he's under a veil, like he's walking down the aisle in a swamp-thing chapel. </p><p>When you take the glass away he doesn't look any different and it fucking aches to see him like that. Unchanging. </p><p>And it shouldn't hurt because you've been seeing him for hours, looking at his body long enough to memorize every inch— not that you didn’t have that down pat already; he was just a silhouette through the smoke and the airborne dirt, but when the bullet hit, ripped through the base of his skull and cut him down quicker than anything, it was obvious to you that he was gone. Before he even started to crumple you knew he would not be getting back on his feet because the sprayed-out path of the bullet put a dent in his outline and you knew the difference at a glance. Still, now that he's dead, there are new things to catalog; the shredded rusty hanks of hair at the back of his head, the midges that swarm his gently gaped-open mouth no matter how many times you shoo them away and pinch his lips closed with your bandanna wrapped around your fingers, the pale cast to his skin that won't budge under the sun (and faintly, you remember someone telling you sunburn is a cell's suicide bomb, or something, and clearly that's off the table, nothing left to kill so you’re never gonna see Mikey's cheeks scorch pink again).</p><p>Been seeing him; not that much of a view, really. Sure, yeah, after everything, when you got him dragged back to this fucking specific section of sandpit in the colossal fucking sandpit you— only you, now— live in, or live through, it was nice to see Mikey's face without that constant fight-for-your-lives grimace he's been rolling on every morning for the past however many years. Nice, but paled in a second when his head fell limp to a new tilt and you looked close and realized forceful slackening does not equal relaxed, no, and there's really nothing comforting about your brother's deathmask no matter which way you turn it in the light. </p><p>The question is: What now? You’re here, Mikey's not, there's just a stretched-out grey stickthing in a garishly, obscenely— yeah, ok, <i>pornographically</i>, but only in the sense it makes your stomach twist— bright, just fucking bright red jacket laying with its elbows jabbed an inch into the sand, and you haven’t stood up or spoken or thought about anything but him for hours upon hours, and the world’s on its edge. Heads or tails. </p><p>—</p><p>This is what you’d talk about if you could give him a eulogy: </p><p>How you spread out in some shitty little sandpit 10ft away from your campfire, the hollow of a dune just high enough to keep you hidden from the others as they ate their stewed lizard balls or whatever nightmare fucking food you’d scrounged up, and you remember being able to smell it as he held you down by your neck and crammed his dick into you— that rancid slipskin smell of boiling scrapmeat— and next time it was your turn to cook you got a fucking hard-on halfway through because breathing in that ugly steam all you could think about was being close-in enough to hear the grit crunching between Kobra’s teeth, dust in your wide shocked eyes as you blacked out scrabbling at his hands; the same dust still stinging in the corners when you came to and dragged your fingernails over the blood blisters his gloves always pinched into the skin of your throat, dust coming out in tear-tracks as you laughed. </p><p>—</p><p>You touch him again. Bare hands; something about the juxtaposition of rot and sand, something like grit between your palms and too-soft too-warm flesh left sitting in the sun. The lingering heat clinging to the first layers of skin on his face proves that you've been out here for a lot less time than you thought, that dawn is still unfathomably far away. </p><p>His boots don’t come off easy. He’s wearing only one sock underneath, a striped grey and black relic you recognize from the floor of your teenage bedroom, and when you peel it off and set it aside it doesn’t look right without a carpet of dirty clothes and crumpled month-overdue math worksheets underneath. You wonder how it survived this long, and then you decide right there you’ll give it to the Girl and that stupid sock can outlive you both. </p><p>—</p><p>His second eulogy: </p><p>How you both got heatstroke in the badlands and were a burnt-and-peeling hallucinating tangle of limbs and teeth for two days, trying to either fuck or carry each other back to base, or both, or neither, and when they found you it took Jet and Ghoul and a bucketful of cold water splashed over you in the way of misbehaving circus animals to pry your hands off each other’s wrists. </p><p>—</p><p>His jeans are a real struggle to pull down, but only because you’re trying not to look.</p><p>—</p><p>His third: </p><p>How he was his own brand of suicidally devoted. Not to a cause or a revolution or a big honkin’ fantasy sky robot or the Girl or anything else you’d dreamed up and adopted that week; he trained himself like a sighted gun to the back of your fucking box-dye neon red head as you went racing off into the sunset, every time— and it’s hard to believe he’s the one who got the base of his skull used for target practice when he was supposed to be keeping you alive, not the other way around. </p><p>If-fucking-only he’d have been chasing the back of your head when that bullet hit home; the one time you weren’t standing in his way turned out to be the one time it counted for keeps.</p><p>—-</p><p>He doesn’t look any different naked. </p><p>You’re trying not to touch the hole that goes longways through the nape of his neck but when you try to pick up his head, angle him the right way, your thumb goes behind his ear to stroke the soft sparse hair there— like it always has when you kiss— and slips right into it. You let go like he burnt you and you can feel your thumbnail glance off the edge of his skull. </p><p>—-</p><p>Fourth: </p><p>Every pair of leather gloves he owned has your teethmarks scarred into them. </p><p>—</p><p>The rain comes all at once. The sky gurgles, warning-shot from miles away, and unzips over you. </p><p>Sand gets beaten up by the sudden machine-gun downpour; flecks sting up your legs, your flanks, stick to you like glue, just rolling beneath your palms when you try to brush it off. </p><p>Your hair's in your eyes. His skin is so fucking cold in the dark and the wet. </p><p>When you were a kid, you never really believed anyone who said the desert gets cold at night but right now you're freezing. </p><p>— </p><p>5th: </p><p>You don’t think you’re going to be able to speak ever again. </p>
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